Bitrix Unveils World's First Multi-Platform Virtual Appliance for Social Collaboration and E-Commerce

ALEXANDRIA, VA, January 23, 2011 (Press-News.org) Bitrix, Inc., a technology trendsetter in business communications solutions, introduces Bitrix Virtual Appliance 2.0 - the world's first dedicated ready-to-use solution designed to run social collaboration and e-commerce applications in the most popular virtual environments including VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Parallels Virtuozzo and Amazon EC2. As a result, SMBs can achieve cost savings up to 50% on deployment and management of applications and reach a new level of business continuity and agility.

Bitrix Virtual Appliance allows Bitrix Intranet and Bitrix Site Manager to be installed on the same physical server and share it with other business-critical applications like e-mail, proxy or CRM. The software supports a variety of virtual environments, contains pre-installed settings optimized for maximum performance and distinguished for ease of use and management. Importantly, Bitrix Virtual Appliance is free of charge, relies on free open source solutions and standards, compatible with free virtualization tools like VMware Player, and can be used for third-party PHP applications, thus improving the total cost of ownership of the organizations IT infrastructure.

Virtualization of social collaboration and e-commerce applications brings extra value to SMBs with heightened business continuity, agility and data security. Firstly, it improves time-to-launch as applications don't require time-consuming deployment and configuration of operating systems or additional software. At the same time, centralized management enables effective orchestration of all business-critical applications from a single console. Secondly, greater availability and shorter disaster recovery time reduce risks associated with service downtime and data loss. Finally, virtualized applications run in a highly-secured sandbox. Coupled with the Bitrix PRO+PRO security framework, it delivers rock-solid protection against the hostile environment of the web.

Bitrix Virtual Appliance also streamlines VPS-based deployment of social collaboration and e-commerce solutions by hosting providers. This allows extending the company's business footprint by selling high-demand software, increasing average revenue per user and creating a new source of recurring profits. A number of hosting providers have already taken advantage of this opportunity.

"Virtualization has already gained popularity in the enterprise market. But the future of this technology strongly depends on the adoption rate among SMBs; it is they who are considered to be the main market driver by the industry analysts. The availability of ready-to-use virtualized social collaboration and e-commerce solutions encourages smaller organizations to consider switching IT infrastructure to a virtual environment", said Dmitry Valyanov, President of Bitrix, Inc.